“‘Wilfred J. Goldsmith, Esquire:’ what! are _you_ our cousin Wilfred? why I took you for a gentleman!” “Oh, Hugh!” exclaimed Percy, scandalised at his brother’s rudeness. “No, I don’t mean that,” continued Hugh quickly, while-Ernest turned away his head to hide an irrepressible smile; “I mean, I took you for a grown up gentleman, and not a boy like Percy, you know.” This involuntary tribute to the man-about-town-like adultness-of his manners and appearance delighted Wilfred Jacob more than the most elaborate compliment courtier could have devised; at length he had found some one to believe in him, and to take him at his own valuation, and he adopted and steadily patronised Hugh from that time forth. He was much too wide awake, however, to allow this to appear; replying in the off-hand; manner which he affected-- “Rather an equivocal compliment that, young’un; but I expect it was better meant than expressed: so I’ll take the will for the deed, as the lawyer’s clerk did after he’d mixed the ‘dog’s-nose’ rather too still at his early dinner. ‘Always give credit for good intentions,’ is a copy old Splitnib (so called from an analogy between his professional avocations, and the fact of his having, in by-gone hours, fallen over a form, and divided the bridge of his own proboscis) will set you writing before you are many days older; and in me you behold a living embodiment of the precept.” “How was it we did not see you at the station, Cousin: Wilfred?” inquired Percy; “we waited as long as we dared, till we thought we should lose the train looking for you.” “Why, you see, my dear boy,” began Wilfred, stretching out a boot beyond the rainbow-coloured wrapper, for the purpose of tapping it admiringly with a dandyfied little cane, “leaving the modern Babylon by the seven o’clock a.m., I necessarily breakfasted early; and as, according to Cocker, the interval between six a.m. and one p.m. embraces seven hours, I experienced, on my arrival at the Flatville station, the very uncomfortable sensation of nature abhorring a vacuum in my breadbasket; and, as even Curtius himself could scarcely have contrived to fill up a similar gulf by jumping down his own throat, I walked first into the refreshment-room, and then into a basin of mock-turtle soup. A deucedly pretty gal it was who handed it to me, too; uncommon attentive she was, to be sure: in fact, _entre nous_,” he continued, leaning confidently towards Ernest, “it strikes me she wasn’t altogether insensible to the personal attractions of ‘yours truly’--do you twig?” Ernest smiled as he replied, “Of course she charged for the admiration as well as for your luncheon.”